More on Money, Greed and Rationality: Game Theory

Try this sometime: walk into a bar. Slap a $100 bill on the table near some other patrons and says"I'm auctioning off this $100 bill. Bidding starts at a dollar. There are only two rules: there must be at least two bidders, and the next highest losing bidder has to pay me too."

Suppose two people (Bill and Ted) start bidding. Bill and Ted can't help themselves. Bill would love to have some extra money to donate to his favorite charitable cause, and Ted is planning on using the proceeds to renew his subscription to some junk magazine (say, The Weekly Standard). A hundred smackers with bidding starting at a buck? What's not to like about that?

So Bill bids a dollar. Ted tops him by bidding $2. (Heck, who wouldn't put $2 on the line for a hundred?)

When the bidding gets up to $99, something interesting happens. Bill realizes that he is out $99 if he doesn't bid $100, but if he bids $100 he can still break even. So he bids $100. Then Ted realizes that if he bids $101, he will only be out a buck instead of $99.

And so it goes. At some point the knife fight starts.

Clarification for Biden

This is not an issue of right or left, conservative or liberal, or any other quasi-political, ideological divide [unless superimposed by those who wish to make it so - precisely to divert ones attention from the real issues (a version of the fallacy of diversion)]:

This statement is not yet up on the USCCB site but CNS is reporting that this is the statement.

Recently we had a duty to clarify the Catholic Church's constant teaching against abortion, to correct misrepresentations of that teaching by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on "Meet the Press" (see here). On September 7, again on "Meet the Press," Senator Joseph Biden made some statements about that teaching that also deserve a response.

Senator Biden did not claim that Catholic teaching allows or has ever allowed abortion. He said rightly that human life begins "at the moment of conception," and that Catholics and others who recognize this should not be required by others to pay for abortions with their taxes.

However, the Senator's claim that the beginning of human life is a "personal and private" matter of religious faith, one which cannot be "imposed" on others, does not reflect Catholic teaching. The Church teaches that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.

The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception (see this resource). The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact.

The second is a moral question, with legal and political consequences: Which living members of the human species should be seen as having fundamental human rights, such as a right not to be killed? The Catholic Church's answer is: Everybody. No human being should be treated as lacking human rights, and we have no business dividing humanity into those who are valuable enough to warrant protection and those who are not. Even this is not solely a Catholic teaching, but a principle of natural law accessible to all people of good will. The framers of the Declaration of Independence pointed to the same basic truth by speaking of inalienable rights, bestowed on all members of the human race not by any human power, but by their Creator. Those who hold a narrower and more exclusionary view have the burden of explaining why we should divide humanity into the moral "haves" and "have-nots," and why their particular choice of where to draw that line can be sustained in a pluralistic society. Such views pose a serious threat to the dignity and rights of other poor and vulnerable members of the human family who need and deserve our respect and protection.

While in past centuries biological knowledge was often inaccurate, modern science leaves no excuse for anyone to deny the humanity of the unborn child. Protection of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but a demand of justice.

Echoes of Fides et Ratio anyone? Again, in the modern world, it is the Church who must protect reason from the encroachment of immanentist irrationalism.

Practical Faith and Reason

It is a principle of human practical wisdom that I am not going to live forever. Or, if one were to deny it the title of "first principle," we can surely say that it is a major step forward in young people's lives when they realize that this is true. It also seems, however, that one of the most basic principles for Christians to grasp - the basis of all Christian practical wisdom - is that I am going to live forever. As C.S. Lewis put it: we have never met a mere mortal. Where does that leave us in reconciling faith and reason at a practical level?

Faith, Reason, and the Splendor of Truth

There is something peculiar which serves both as a cause for annoyance, and an occasion for amusement: that the encyclical Veritatis splendor preceded the encyclical Fides et Ratio. The former is no more than an application of the principles laid down in the latter; that is a cause for annoyance. The occasion for amusement is how much the enemies of the Church and God's law were upset by the former and how little they cared about the latter, when clearly the later encyclical provides the justification for everything that was attacked in the earlier.

Go figure.

We Are Different

Not brilliant, perhaps, but certainly insightful. "The Clash of Orthodoxies," is an article penned in 1999 by Robert P. George, the Cyrus Hall McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. It is one of those pieces that richly repays those who take the time to grapple with its foundations.